Hello!

Have a cup of coffee as I introduce you to one of the most exciting things your nerves must be feeling at the moment. I’m starting a new escapade in which I will mix the bright and vivid world of FPGAs with the practical magic of embedded systems. I would like to take you along. Think of this blog, “FPGA for the Embedded Curious,” as a sort of little nook in which we peel back the mysteries of using FPGA devices from a software developer’s perspective.

FPGAs, or Field Programmable Gate Arrays if you’re not into abbreviations, are like a sandbox for tech enthusiasts.

They’re like these things where you can mess around with digital circuits without the whole world getting sand in it, so to speak. I mean, to “get started” with FPGAs in the traditional sense, you’ve kind of got to “get hip” to the complex language of RTL (Register Transfer Level) development. It’d be much like learning French if all one had ever known was English—exhilarating but oh so intimidating. But here’s where it gets cool for us embedded developers.

Things like Hardware Processing Systems (HPS) and soft cores like NIOS V are remaking an FPGA world. Literally, this means that when at the same time we are getting our hands very dirty with hardware design, we can keep running in sync with our adored software languages. It’s a bit like finding out your favorite book is available in your native language; suddenly, everything just clicks.

So, what’s this blog about? This would be a diary on how I went from being an FPGA developer to dipping my feet into the embedded systems pond.

More critically, this is a series of friendly guides and stories that aim to help you—yes, you—integrate FPGAs into your embedded projects without needing to wake up as a hardware guru one fine morning.

We’ll explore how to add that FPGA sprinkle to our projects, making them faster, smarter, and maybe even cooler. I will share everything from “aha!” moments to “oops!

Thanks for dropping by, and I hope to share this adventure with you. Let’s make some magic together with FPGAs and Embedded Systems!

All our examples and code will be here https://github.com/fpgaembedded